I have been a programmer for 13 years, I went through the stages of programming sequentially, then into Object Oriented - I got pretty comfortable creating all my modules from scratch in OO and reusing them and extending them.

Over the last few years I get pressure from a lot of fellow programmers that using frameworks is the only way to go, clients request it, co-workers all use it (CakePHP that is), but I feel confined - I get the benefits when using them, the rapid development, the security, having a whole community working on something to make it tried, tested and true - but still something turns me off of them.

I would say that frameworks is the road that you have take in majority of the cases. I haven't used CakePHP but I have a used Codeigniter.

The good thing about frameworks is that it is "ready made". You do not have to reinvent many things like MVC, paging, speed of access, having a separate class for Calendar, session management, search engine friendly urls, better security, xss filtering etc etc. When you have all these tonnes of benefits "ready made" for you, I think it is better to use frameworks.

Another good thing that I liked about frameworks (especially when I using Codeigniter) is that all the members of our coding team were writing nearly the same style of code. If you are not using frameworks then one of your team members will make a database call in one way, another person will write it in another and finally when there is a bug it is hard to debug and you start pulling your hair.

But there will be cases where a framework is not the right solution. In case of an academic project (to add a few numbers or to do a few calculations) or to do a few statistical analysis etc , there is no need to use a framework. Also, if you are very strict about having your own code for various reasons, a framework need not be used as long as you have plenty of resources to write your own code.